The Quick and the Dead

Reports that the body of recently deceased Venezuelan president, Hugo Chavez, will be embalmed and placed on "permanent" display at the Museum of the Revolution have brought to mind other examples of this phenomenon. Other revered Communist leaders, such as Lenin, Mao Zedong, and Ho Chi Minh, received the same treatment after their deaths. And, of course, there are many examples of Christian saints whose bodies remain on display (or are brought out periodically). 

Placing the bodies of particularly revered or heroic figures on display has a long history. In medieval historical writing (including historical chronicle and epic poems), heroic warriors from Troy and Carthage were embalmed (sometimes with magical fluids) and preserved for eternity. Hector, the prince of Troy, was placed in the open, where his subjects could see him. In one account, the embalming fluid went in at the top of his skull, and then flowed through his veins into his extremities. 

Hector's embalmed body.
Cod. Bodmer 78, fol, 58r

-->



According to many natural philosophers, a person could not be considered fully dead until decay or putrefaction occurred. So keeping Hector perfectly "fresh" actually meant keeping him partially alive. Kind of like Han Solo in carbonite, or Wesley in "The Princess Bride."

Accusations of Vatican Corruption Are Nothing New

I've written before about how the persistent accusations against high-ranking Church officials of failing to report (or covering up) credible accusations of child rape and abuse at the hands of priests goes back to the Investiture Contest. But it wasn't until Joseph Ratzinger, formerly known as Pope Benedict XVI, retired that I realized that there are other similarities between the Catholic Church of the eleventh century and the twenty-first century. 

A fascinating interview with Vatican beat reporter John Thavis on Fresh Air shed light on all kinds of possible conspiracies, cover-ups, misdeeds, and shenanigans. Cronyism is apparently pretty common, and there are many who think that this kind of petty corruption should not be part of the Church. In 2009, the former pope revoked the excommunication of a bishop who denied the existence of the Holocaust. Clerical sex abuse scandals have rocked Belgium, Germany, the Netherlands, Ireland, and Australia; in the US, Philadelphia and Los Angeles have seen indictments and resignations of high-ranking Church officials over this same issue. Some claim that Ratzinger knew far more about the extent of the abuse, and worked to cover it up before he became pope. The former pope's former butler was tried for leaking classified Vatican documents to journalists; these leaks led to recent revelations about wire-tapping of Vatican officials and authorized by the secretariat of state.

In the eleventh century, many clerics were disgusted by the corruption and immorality they saw in Rome. Cronyism, nepotism, and simony were rampant. Some popes were accused of necromancy, fornication, theft, and even murder. Many of these accusations were politically motivated, and some were leveled at popes after their deaths. But in the eleventh (and twelfth) century, the struggle for power was between the papacy and secular powers (such as the Holy Roman Emperor). Now the struggle is taking place within the Church itself.

Book Announcement!

I'm pleased to announce that Medieval Robots, my book on medieval automata, will be coming to bookstores and the Internet in Spring/Summer 2014. It's official.

My cat ate my book contract.

Playing Those Medieval Robot Games

Google has alerted me to the fact that Starbound, a PC game that should be coming out in the next few months, contains medieval robots. The Glitch, a collective simulation of artificial, sentient, self-aware beings, were created by a god-like race to simulate the process of "civilization." But all of the experiments destroyed themselves, except for the ones that are still stuck in the Middle Ages. 

I need your help here, folks. I know nothing about gaming, but this sounds awesome. If you have any information about Starbound or its world, let me know! 

Russian Meteorite Could Provide the Next Excalibur

Intense! That Russian meteor was bananas. Apparently, the bright explosion was perhaps caused by the amount of iron in it. 
 
This meteor was unusual because its material was so hard — it may have been made of iron, the statement said — which allowed some small fragments, or meteorites, perhaps 5 percent of the meteor’s mass, to reach the Earth’s surface.

An enterprising smith could, under the right influences, forge this meteoric iron into a sword for the ages. 


Fallen to earth in a falling star, a clap of thunder, a great burst of light; dragged still smoking to be forged by the little dark smiths who dwelled on the chalk before the ring stones were raised; powerful, a weapon for a king, broken and reforged this time into the long leaf-shaped blade, tooled and annealed in blood and fire, hardened...a sword three times forged, never ripped out of the earth’s womb, and thus twice holy.... (Marion Zimmer Bradley, The Mists of Avalon)

Except that apparently Terry Pratchett has already done this.

Using Computers to Date Medieval Manuscripts

A recent article in the Journal of Applied Statistics by two computer scientists and a medieval historian at the University of Toronto details their work using computer algorithms to date previously undated charters from the post-Conquest period in England. The researchers used the archive of dated early English charters at the University of Toronto to devise algorithms that can offer additional tools for dating medieval documents. 

By using a data set that has dates attached, the researchers were able to compare their results with existing (and, presumably, accepted) data. They based the algorithms on specific phrases that appear in charters and that vary over time. A charter that had been dated by a medievalist as having been written between 1235 and 1245 was compared using the data from the training set, and was dated by computational methods to 1246. 

It's fantastic to see another instance of humanists and scientists working together to solve historical problems. Archaeologists, paleo-epidemiologists, and biological anthropologists have been using scientific methods to shed more light on the bacterial cause of the Black Death and the reasons for its rapid spread in the 14th century. Yet the use of computational algorithms suggests several questions that remain to be answered. A specific question has to do with forgeries. Many medieval charters are forgeries. The most famous is the Donation of Constantine, which was discovered to be a fraud by the fifteenth century. It's not yet clear how a computer algorithm could help identify forged charters. Some may betray themselves with anachronistic phrasing, but others were written with enough care or close enough to the time that they purported to be from that looking for particular words and phrases would not uncover them.

Another, larger, question has to do with the way that text-based analysis and scientific methods can work together to shed new light on old questions. The Donation of Constantine was discovered to be a fraud by using similar methods: checking the language of the document itself. Two versions of the history of the Trojan War, widely accepted throughout the Middle Ages as being eyewitness accounts of the conflict (and more accurate than Homer's poetry), were unmasked as frauds in the early modern period--again, due to the efforts of scholars who painstakingly compared the texts with other, external data. It's not yet clear if computational methods are more accurate than what we might call scholarly expertise (though, of course, the scientists writing the algorithms are experts themselves), or computational methods offer more speed, and thus the ability to examine larger data sets. Both benefits can be enormously useful to medievalists. I can imagine that scholars working on projects that rely on charters as evidence might be grateful to have tools that could confirm (or call into question) their own chronology.

How Early Modern Animal Jetpacks Went Viral

Alexis Madrigal, over at The Atlantic, has a post up about a 16th-century German manuscript image. The image, below, is from a German manuscript, Feuer Buech, about warfare tactics and weaponry. 

The image of feline- and avian-powered incendiary devices [so sad!] has been swirling around the Twitter- and Tumblr-verses for a few months. You can see here how it was tweeted, tumblr-ed, and then eventually picked up by The Atlantic. This trajectory is a great illustration of how social media, open access policies, and the digital humanities are making medieval and early modern manuscripts available to huge audiences. Fantastic!

Feuer Buech, Germany, 1584. Ms. Codex 109, Philadelphia, UPenn Library.